A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

Tag: health care reform

ObamaCare directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to define the “essential health benefits” that all consumers in the individual and small-group health insurance markets must purchase. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius kicked that decision to the states, giving them a deadline of this past Friday, September 30. Kaiser Health News reports that all of 16 states submitted an Essential Health Benefits (EHB) benchmark to HHS by the deadline.

But did Sebelius have the authority to kick this decision to states? In a September 26 letter to Sebelius, Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Michael Consedine writes:

[T]he PPACA clearly states that the Secretary of HHS is to define the EHB package for policies offered both inside and outside of health insurance exchanges. While the language in PPACA was plain that this statutory responsibility fell on HHS, in December of last year HHS issued guidance preliminarily indicating states must select a benchmark design, with HHS potentially acting as final arbiter…of that selection. (Emphasis added.)

Is September 30 even a deadline?

Some communications from your agency indicate that this is a suggested response date while others indicate that it is a deadline of some sort. We again are asking for clarity.

Letting states make that decision will increase flexibility, though. Right?

[I]n reality the guidance placed additional restrictions on the EHB selection rather than flexibility. HHS guidance appears to render the states’ ability to innovate and to make an independent choice illusory. (Emphasis added.)

Indeed, the 16 states who have complied may be in for a rude awakening.

HHS indicated that any selection by the states will be subject to additional review, but we have no definitive guidance as to what, if any, weight will be given to a state’s selection. The minimum amount of information provided to date invites concern that your agency will alter or override a state’s submission…raising serious questions as to whether states have any meaningful ability to make a definitive selection of an EHB benchmark. (Emphasis added.)

Pennsylvania thus declined to submit one, and effectively told Sebelius to do her job.

Louisiana went a step further, threatening to hold Sebelius accountable if she doesn’t. In a September 27 letter, Louisiana’s Secretary of Health and Hospitals Bruce Greenstein and Insurance Commissioner James Donelson noted that the December 2011 “bulletin” merely stated that HHS “intend[s] to propose” a deadline of September 30 for making that decision—meaning that the bulletin “neither… has the force of law, nor commits federal regulators to any particular course of action.” Moreover:

[I]t is our State’s conclusion that while the bulletin states a decision is to be made by [September 30], this “deadline” has never been formalized through the official rulemaking process. As long as formal rules do not exist, the federal government can change its approach. Since the federal government is not bound by these bulletins, neither are the States. As such, the State of Louisiana is not legally required to submit a benchmark preference by [September 30,] 2012. The State of Louisiana will not permit the federal government to dictate to our residents a default benchmark plan, as the federal government, in its disregard of the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act regarding essential health benefits and other provisions of the PPACA, has no authority to do so under federal or Louisiana law until regulations are published in the Federal Register, following established notice and comment procedure.

The process developed for defining the essential health benefit benchmark has been a completely new method of establishing law without proper rulemaking. Implementation of new policies without open and public comment and publication in the Federal Register is in clear violation of the law.

The administration has charged states to build what the federal government mandates, but the federal government has provided [only] informal guidance and incomplete rules and regulations…Accordingly, there will be no essential health benefits package for the State of Louisiana, and we will pursue all avenues to prevent the federal government from selecting one on behalf of our state. (Emphasis added.)

As I have written previously, “implementing these parts of the law can only lead to more regulation, fewer choices, and higher costs. And of course, state officials will take the blame when ObamaCare starts increasing costs and denying care to people. There is simply no good reason for states to assume this impossible, harmful, and thankless task.”

The debate over President Barack Obama’s health-care law has taken another twist. Now conservatives and libertarians are defending it, while the administration tries to toss part of the legislation out.

The reason for this role reversal is that the drafters of the law outsmarted themselves and handed their opponents a weapon. Now they would like to pretend the law doesn’t say what it does.

Obama’s plan makes tax credits available to people who get health insurance from exchanges set up by state governments. If states don’t establish those exchanges, the federal government will do so for them. The federal exchanges, however, don’t come with tax credits: The law authorizes credits only for people who get insurance from state-established exchanges. And that creates some problems the administration didn’t foresee, and now hopes to wish away…

The administration’s response to the impending failure of its signature legislation – a failure resulting entirely from its flawed design – has been to ignore the inconvenient portion of the law. In May, the Internal Revenue Service decided it would issue tax credits to people who get insurance from exchanges established by the federal government. It has thus exposed firms and individuals to taxes and penalties without any legal authorization. Obviously, that situation sets the stage for lawsuits.

The plaintiffs will have a strong case. Jonathan Adler and Michael Cannon – two libertarians, the first a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and the second a health-care analyst at the Cato Institute – have done more than anyone to bring attention to this issue. They point out that every health bill advanced by Senate Democrats clearly made tax credits conditional on [states implementing the law]. They have also uncovered that during the debate over the bill, Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, explicitly said the same thing.

Today’s New York Times features an opinion piece by J.D. Kleinke of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Kleinke’s thesis is that ObamaCare’s conservative opponents should stop complaining. “ObamaCare is based on conservative, not liberal, ideas.”

If one defines conservative ideas as those that emphasize free markets and personal responsibility, there is zero truth to this claim.

Free markets require freedom, like the freedom to control your own property, to enter markets, and to negotiate prices and other contractual terms. ObamaCare mandates how people must dispose of their property, imposes tremendous barriers to entry into markets, and imposes price controls and myriad other terms on ostensibly private contracts.

Market prices are the lifeblood of a market economy. Kleinke considers them a “flaw” that ObamaCare uses “market principles” to “correct.”

As I have written elsewhere, ObamaCare “promotes irresponsibility by allowing healthy people to wait until they get sick to buy coverage. It creates that free-rider problem, which has been known to make insurance markets collapse. Supporters of the law could have taken personal responsibility for this instability they introduced into the market—say, by volunteering to pay the free riders’ premiums. Instead, they imposed a mandate, which attempts to stabilize the market by depriving others of their money and freedom. Forcing others to bear the costs of your decisions is the opposite of personal responsibility.”

Employers are hardly “free to decide” under a law that penalizes them for not offering government-designed health benefits.

Kleinke is apparently unaware that half of the $2 trillion of new government spending in this “pro-market” law comes from a massive expansion of a tax-financed, government-run health insurance program that crowds out private markets – Medicaid.

I could go on.

Even if one adopts the more forgiving definition that conservative ideas are whatever ideas conservatives advocate, there still isn’t enough truth to sustain Kleinke’s point. Yes, the conservative Heritage Foundation trumpeted ObamaCare’s regulatory scheme from 1989 until around the time a Democratic president endorsed it. But as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru writes, accurately, “The think tankers were divided, with the Heritage Foundation an outlier. It was an outlier, too, in the broader right-of-center intellectual world.” Kleinke even flubs the paternity of the individual mandate, which he says is “an idea forged not by liberal social engineers at Brookings but conservative economists at the Heritage Foundation.” In fact, the idea originated with Randall Bovbjerg of the left-wing Urban Institute.

Kleinke has done insightful work. This oped is just nutty, and emblematic of the lack of intellectual rigor among the Church of Universal Coverage members residing in both left-wing and right-wing think tanks.

Why am I only hearing about President Obama’s gob-smacking “I haven’t raised taxes” claim today, and from Reason?

On CBS News’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, President Obama said, “Taxes are lower on families than they’ve been probably in the last 50 years. So I haven’t raised taxes.”

As of Monday morning, neither the Washington Post’s Pinocchio-awarding Fact-Checker, nor the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, nor the Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning Politifact.com had risen to this opportunity…

Unbelievable. I just checked those websites, and they still haven’t.

Fortunately, Ira Stoll has. He leaves out a number of taxes President Obama has enacted, though, including raising the Medicare payroll tax on high-income earners, applying the Medicare payroll tax to non-payroll income for high-income earners, limiting the tax exclusion for flexible spending accounts, increasing the penalties on certain health savings account withdrawals, the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans…

The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff writes that the Department of Health and Human Services has decided to “punt” on the “monumental” task of dictating exactly what types of coverage those who get health insurance through the individual market or small employers must purchase. HHS has decided to let each state decide for its own residents what constitutes “essential health benefits.” It was a shrewd move: under the guise of decentralized decision-making, HHS is offering to let state officials take the blame for an inevitably controversial decision and the inevitable higher costs that will result. Yay, federalism! States have until the end of this month to decide just how much coverage they are going to help ObamaCare force their citizens to purchase.

Kliff reports that many states are now wrestling with the unanswerable question, “What health-care benefits are absolutely essential?”

California legislators say acupuncture makes the cut. Michigan regulators would include chiropractic services. Oregon officials would leave both of those benefits on the cutting-room floor. Colorado has deemed pre-vacation visits to travel clinics necessary, while leaving costly fertility treatments out of its preliminary package…

A Virginia advisory board recommended that the state adopt a plan that includes speech therapy and chiropractic care. A District subcommittee has endorsed a plan pegged to an existing BlueCross BlueShield package, and public comment remains open through Friday Sept. 28…

Of course, an objective definition of “essential” coverage is impossible. Like “medical necessity,” the only way to determine whether health coverage is “essential” is if the benefits exceed the costs. That is an inherently subjective question that no legislator or regulator, state or federal, can or should try to answer for a diverse population of consumers. When they do, health care providers invariably hijack the process, demanding that consumers be required to purchase coverage of their services. Since the legislators/regulators are handing out benefits while consumers and taxpayers shoulder the costs, the result is predictable: health insurance premiums rise.

Thanks to HHS’s punt, providers now have an even greater incentive to lobby states to mandate coverage of their services. If a state creates its own list of “essential health benefits,” then any benefits the state mandates will be eligible for federal subsidies. If not, the cost of state-mandated benefits continues to fall on consumers or employers, who tend to complain. (Again, shrewd. Corrupt and irresponsible. But shrewd.)

But since ObamaCare is on the books, and HHS gave states a choice, what should states do?

The choice is identical to what states face with regard to health insurance Exchanges: states have the option to implement part of ObamaCare themselves, but no matter what they decide, Washington is ultimately running the show.

The federal government will not let states pick a menu of “essential health benefits” or establish an Exchange with fewer regulatory controls than HHS would impose itself. Since less regulation than the federal government would impose is not an option, implementing these parts of the law can only lead to more regulation, fewer choices, and higher costs. And of course, state officials will take the blame when ObamaCare starts increasing costs and denying care to people. There is simply no good reason for states to assume this impossible, harmful, and thankless task.

Instead of doing the feds’ dirty work, states should use this opportunity to show how ObamaCare rigs the game against states and consumers alike. State officials that want to rid the nation of ObamaCare should submit to HHS a “benchmark” EHB plan that they know HHS will refuse. It could be either the most affordable health plan they can find in their individual or small group markets, or a plan that state officials designed themselves. Leave out benefits that HHS considers dealbreakers. Push the deductible as high as you dare. Allow annual or lifetime limits. The less coverage you include in your EHB benchmark, the more choice consumers will have and the lower the premiums will be. Submit such a proposal to HHS and dare them to reject it. Let your voters see that under ObamaCare, choice is a mirage. Dare HHS to explain why they rejected affordable health plans and forced the Treasury to subsidize more-expensive health plans.

Alternatively, state who are not inclined to confrontation can tell the Obama administration the same thing they should say with regard to health insurance Exchanges: it’s your stupid law, you implement it.

The following are excerpts from an article in today’s Wall Street Journal. See if you can spot the fraud lobby:

In 2011, New York charged [Medicaid] a per-diem rate of $5,118 for residents of the [state-run] institutions, a network of 11 centers that now house about 1,300 people with severe developmental disabilities. Over the course of a year, Medicaid spends $1.9 million for every resident, or $2.5 billion in total—with half coming from the federal government. But the cost of running the institutions is only a quarter of that amount.

[A congressional] report said New York took advantage of a complex formula and kept federal officials in the dark for years…

The committee’s report said Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration refused to cooperate with the investigation. Joshua Vlasto, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said the report’s conclusions were “wrong and totally misleading” and that a threatened “precipitous reduction” in funding would jeopardize administration efforts to modernize and restructure its Medicaid program…

But at a Thursday hearing, Penny Thompson, a CMS deputy director, suggested…, “You can expect to see a rate that’s about one-fifth of its current level” … without specifying a time frame. Such a reduction would reduce the annual federal reimbursement by about $1 billion, punching a hole in New York’s $54 billion Medicaid program…

The skewed methodology traces back more than 20 years, when New York got permission from the federal government to use a different formula for state-run developmental centers, assuring officials that the rates would hew close to costs.

But almost immediately, reimbursements began to skyrocket. The new methodology allowed New York to bill Medicaid for ghost patients: When a patient was discharged from a state-run facility, New York retained nearly two-thirds of the reimbursement amount. The formula also double-billed taxpayers: Many of those patients who left the centers moved into Medicaid-financed group homes.

Between 1990 and 2011, the daily reimbursement rate grew to $5,118 from $348. Ms. Thompson said it wasn’t clear if CMS “completely understood” the cost projections when it approved the rates. CMS officials acknowledge they first became aware of the problem in 2007 but waited three years before launching a probe.

In June 2010, the Poughkeepsie Journal ran a lengthy investigative piece about the rates. CMS started its investigation in response to the newspaper’s report, the committee said.

Lest you think I’m blaming Medicaid fraud on one political party, have a gander at my recent article, “Entitlement Bandits”:

Even conservatives fight anti-fraud measures, albeit in the name of preventing frivolous litigation, when they oppose expanding whistle-blower lawsuits, where private citizens who help the government win a case get to keep some of the penalty.

Yesterday, the attorney general of Oklahoma amended that state’s ObamaCare lawsuit. The amended complaint asks a federal court to clarify the Supreme Court’s ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius, but it also challenges an IRS rule that imposes ObamaCare’s employer mandate where the statute does not authorize it: on employers in the 30 to 40 states that decline to implement a health insurance “exchange.”

The Final Rule was issued in contravention of the procedural and substantive requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act…; has no basis in any law of the United States; and directly conflicts with the unambiguous language of the very provision of the Internal Revenue Code it purports to interpret…

Under Defendants’ Interpretation, [this rule] expand[s] the circumstances under which an Applicable Large Employer must make an Assessable Payment…with the result that an employer may be required to make an Assessable Payment under circumstances not provided for in any statute and explicitly ruled out by unambiguous language in the Affordable Care Act.

Plaintiff believes…that subjecting the State of Oklahoma in its capacity as an employer to the employer mandate would cause the Affordable Care Act to exceed Congress’s legislative authority; to violate the Tenth Amendment; to impermissibly interfere with the residual sovereignty of the State of Oklahoma; and to violate Constitutional norms relating to the relationship between the states, including the State of Oklahoma, and the Federal Government.

As for the latest claim to be made in defense of the IRS rule – that an Exchange established by the federal government under Section 1321 is an Exchange “established by the state under Section 1311” – the complaint says this:

If the Act provides or is interpreted to provide that an Exchange established by HHS under Section 1321(c) of the Act is a form of what the Act refers to as “an Exchange established by a State under Section 1311 of [the Act],” then Section 1321(c) is unconstitutional because it commandeers state governmental authority with respect to State Exchanges, permits HHS to exercise a State’s legislative and/or executive power, and otherwise causes the Exchange-related provisions of the Act…to exceed Congress’s legislative authority; to violate the Tenth Amendment; to infringe on the residual sovereignty of the States under the Constitution; and to violate Constitutional norms relating to the relationship between the states, including the State of Oklahoma, and the Federal Government.

Oklahoma does not yet list any private-sector employers as co-plaintiffs, but that may change.

Since this IRS rule also unlawfully taxes 250,000 Oklahomans under the individual mandate – a tax that in 2016 will reach $2,085 for a family of four earning $24,000 – the attorney general has an awful lot of individual Oklahomans that he could add to its plaintiff roster.